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28 August 2013

Helping everyone live an independent digital life - an update on accessibility at Virgin Media

Earlier this year, we set about building on our work to date to make accessibility part and parcel of the Virgin Media experience. This is all about ensuring our products and services are accessible and enjoyable for everybody regardless of age or ability.

At Virgin Media, we’re all about helping everybody live an independent digital life and we want to share with you all that we're doing in this space - here’s an update on what we’ve achieved over the last couple of months:

1) Accessibility website – we’ve launched a dedicated destination with all the information you might need.

This website is designed to help our customers and their families find relevant and useful information in one place, including:

Key information about accessible product features

Various ways in which you can get in touch with us

Information about the partners we’re working with including The Digital Accessibility Centre who built the site with us, our charity partner, Scope, and also MPH Group who provide our customers with bills and correspondence in accessible formats.

The information will evolve over time but we’d love to hear your feedback - please drop us a line on sustainability@virginmedia.co.uk.

So far hundreds of our staff in our call centres have gone through a new training module to help drive awareness of accessibility. We have also started work on an accessibility awareness training programme that every member of staff will be able to add to their own learning plans soon.

We want to ensure customers who need additional assistance are able to get it and that’s why we've now improved our customer experience to route calls to the most appropriate teams in our business. We have also produced and published a series of weekly communications briefings for all our contact centre staff. These briefings clarify processes and signpost other useful resources.

Ahead of his epic run – 40 marathons in 40 days – Richard took time out of his busy training schedule to visit one of our biggest call centres. In Swansea, Richard toured the facility, spoke to our staff and held a Q&A session. While he was in town, Richard also met with an organisation called the Digital Accessibility Centre who we’ve partnered with to help us improve our products and services.

Virgin Media is encouraging staff and customers to run with Richard and we’ve launched an app to track the practice miles our staff are doing – for which we will make a donation to Richard’s charities - Scope and Sarcoma UK. We’ve also gone to town on bringing this campaign to life across our stores, offices, vans and lorries.

The approach we’ve taken involves thousands of people across the business – this is not the job of one team. But we’ve not finished yet; we’re working on lots more, so look out for another update coming soon.